How to be ill

With the NHS at breaking point, hospitals overflowing and queues to the local GP being longer than the one at Greggs when they were giving away free cheese pasties, it seems like the right time to give some valuable advice on how to be ill.

There are as many illnesses out there as there are opinions on how to treat them and I may deal with legs dropping off and other hospital related ailments at a later date but for now I will tackle the most deadly and debilitating illness of all, the common cold.

Do I have cold or flu?

There is a simple rule of thumb here. If you are able to read this blog or post on social media about your illness, you do not have flu. Flu will wreck you; you will not be able to lift your head off the pillow.

Your legs will not work to the point that soiling the bed seems like a reasonable option. The only reason you don’t soil the bed is that it is too much effort in itself.

Any energy you have needs to be preserved so you can knock on the coffin lid to remind your family that you haven’t actually died.

And then we have ‘man flu’. Or to put it more accurately, we don’t. ‘Man flu’ is a phrase that was invented by comedienne Emmeline Pankhurst to mock men who whinge on too much.

I’ve had people phone in sick with ‘man flu’. You might as well phone in with a shandy hangover, it doesn’t exist.

How to treat the common cold.

Despite numerous warnings all over TV and social media, big posters in doctor’s waiting rooms and the threat of the receptionist’s wrath, people still insist on going to the doctor’s when they have a cold.

They can’t treat it and all you are doing is spreading the disease further; more than likely to people who are already unwell hence them being in the doctor’s in the first place and therefore increasing the burden on the NHS. Cold or flu is not the problem here, idiocy is.

The government recently tried to pass emergency legislation where anybody who presented themselves at the doctor’s with the common cold was given an injection. This would immediately kill them and they would be hoyed in the wheelie bin out the back.

The only thing that stopped this legislation being pushed through was the smell the dead bodies would create due to the change from weekly to fortnightly bin collections.

As with all illnesses, the best way to treat a cold is by self medicating. You could take the sensible approach and drink lots of water and take paracetamol or you can mix it up a bit and raid your medicine cabinet. I recently discovered some Codeine from an operation years back. Might not cure my cold but the fevered dreams are fantastic.

If you have the energy, you may wish to visit your local chemist. I went a couple of weeks ago for some cough syrup and was given something that seemed very ‘under the counter’ but for under two quid, I wasn’t complaining.

A quick Google search showed that it is banned in America and is classed the same as heroin. That’s the shit you want. It sent me mad but I was in bed with a cold anyway so who cares?

You may be surprised to know that I have a cure for the common cold, it works in 90% of cases. It is my recipe for Thai Chicken Soup and it will literally burn the snot away. If you are nice to me I may share it in a future blog.

Do I go to work?

In a word, no.

You may think you are too important and nobody else can staple those bits of paper together like you do. You might believe that you are doing your boss a favour by struggling in covered in snot. You are wrong.

Anybody who goes to work with a cold will spend half the day whinging about having a cold and the other half rearranging the Lemsip box on their desk so the maximum amount of people can see it. They will infect the rest of the office whilst spraying used tissues around like a teenager who has just discovered Pornhub.

Your boss can plan around you being off sick, they can’t plan around you being present but doing nothing.

And don’t try the old “I’ve got cold, can I just work from home” trick. We know what you’re up to.

If you insist on struggling in, at least do it in style. I once thought I had ‘a bit of a cold’ but after feeling worse as the day went on, I was sent home. Next day I was in an ambulance and spent five nights in hospital after losing four pints of blood.